Above the storm she could hear Trevelyan laugh.
"Let you go, when I've got you at last! Let you go when your face has haunted me through all the days and all the nights of the long months! Let—you—go!"
"Oh, Robert!"
"Oh, you think I'm mad! Well, perhaps I am for love of you. You haunt me. You possess me. It was your face I dreamed of in the foam. There! don't tremble so! I won't hurt you, child!" The thunder drowned his voice.
"Do you dream what you are to me or could make of me? Do you know what it is to hold a man's soul in your hands?"
The spell of his words lifted. The instinct of an unknown danger possessed her. She slipped away in the blackness toward the door. The silence grew and grew.
Gradually the darkness lifted and the thunder and the boom of the surf lessened and the lightning came at long and longer intervals. Cary became acutely conscious of every sound. Somewhere in the distance she heard voices and the echo of men's footfalls. She kept her eyes away from Trevelyan who was standing with his back to her. Danger lay that way.
Then the spell of Trevelyan's nearness crept over her again. She tried to fight it off, trembling. She moved a step toward him, one hand pressed close to her breast. Then she paused, arrested by a voice.
"Robert! Cary! Cary!"
The sound echoed down the great hall, across the still deserted rooms, to the study where they stood.